After posting this I happen to find out that this problem bubbled up while I was overseas - there was a solution a few days old that I did not see before posting.
See this post for this solution (others may pop up elsewhere):
- 390 nvidia drivers causing the problem in Gnome 46
- add the following lines to /etc/environment and reboot
GSK_RENDERER=gl
GDK_DEBUG=gl-prefer-gl
- keep this until 390 drivers fixed?